18 Pinball Themes Stern Won't Be Making Anytime Soon*

Published on

July 23, 2023

Updated on

May 30, 2025

Credits

Colin Alsheimer

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This past weekend, Stern attended the San Diego Comic-Con as part of the release of their newest pinball machine, Venom. That part isn't terribly interesting by itself, but what was worth noting was a couple of Facebook updates from DeadFlip AKA Jack Danger AKA Stern's newest hot game designer. Captioned simply, "Comic-Con Research. PT1" and "Comic-Con Research Pt2", the two updates contain albums of roughly 18 photos from the Comic-Con floor of various franchise IP.

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The goal of the post, clearly, is to rouse social media reactions from pinball fans who may see one of their dream themes in the album, eventually leading to discussion and speculation that Stern may be considering producing one of the named themes. It's fun content that plays on discussions pinball fans are already having.

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As a contrarian at heart, I tend to think it's way more likely that of all the franchise IP listed below, Stern has zero of them in the queue for at least the immediate future. If any of these were actually in consideration at Stern HQ, it would be incredibly curious for one of their lead designers (with a hefty social media following of his own) to be sharing coy photo references to them on Facebook.

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So with that in mind, what's more likely to be true - that DeadFlip is sharing clues to an upcoming game? Or that none of these are upcoming games (at least to his knowledge) and are therefore safe to post about in this way? We'd go for the latter.

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Of note in the list below is He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, a theme that's often been tied to Stern in the rumor mill, only maybe that's truly not the case.

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